UCarShare is growing and Portland's parking reforms are working

It's hard to believe, but UhaulCarShare has been operating in Portland for over six years now.

They started with four cars parked near Monument Square and the ferry terminal. Here's a screenshot of their website in 2009:

As of this fall, they've doubled the local fleet to 8 cars and expanded into South Portland with a car parked at the Southern Maine Community College campus. Here's their new coverage map:

A lot of UhaulCarShare's success here comes from a helpful new reform of parking rules in the city's zoning requirements. For the last few years now, city planners have allowed a reduction in developers' expensive parking-construction mandates if the developers agree to sponsor a carsharing vehicle on-site.

Several new apartment buildings have taken advantage of this incentive, most recently Avesta Housing's 409 Cumberland Avenue apartment block, which built only 18 basement parking spaces for its 57 new apartment units and sponsored a new UhaulCarShare vehicle to be parked on-site. This arrangement benefits everyone: reduced construction costs for the developers, reduced housing costs and more mobility options for residents, and a more convenient carsharing network for neighbors.

Portland Street pilot bike lane

The city has repaved Portland Street and re-striped its wide expanse of pavement to give us a short stretch of bike lanes between Deering Oaks and Preble Street:

(an aside: have you ever noticed the terminating vista of the City Hall clocktower at the end of this street? Too bad the Libra Foundation's huge white elephant parking garage squats in front of it to block most of the view. Also too bad the public market that that garage was supposed to support failed after just a few years in business – probably unrelated to the massive, expensive garage it was hitched to, right?)

At a recent meeting, I heard that these bike lanes are being tested on an interim basis while the city gears up for a more complete reconstruction of Portland Street in the next couple of years. So, if you like what you see here, consider sending a message of thanks to your local city councilor and the city manager.

And also consider asking the city to go even further with traffic-calming on Portland Street. Removing some of the street's excessive pavement now could pay off with thousands of dollars' worth in annual maintenance savings in the years to come:

• Reducing the street width and adding trees at intersections with landscaped curb extensions
• Replacing a handful of parking spaces with stormwater treatment infrastructure (the 'pilot' layout increases on-street parking significantly with angled parking near Preble Street, so some spots could be removed in other locations and still maintain a net gain for automobiles)
• Narrowing the street and widening sidewalks between Brattle Street and High Street, where Portland Street had formerly ballooned to a four-lane roadway

City-owned garages ask Portland taxpayers for a $865,000 subsidy

The city has just posted the city manager's proposed capital improvements program for 2016 and beyond.

This is the budget document that typically allocates local funds for traffic calming and bike/ped infrastructure – but there's not much of that in this year's proposal.

The one line-item for bike or pedestrian infrastructure is $500,000 for basic sidewalk maintenance and repair – which is in line with what's been spent in recent years.

Why should Portland taxpayers pay for Falmouth's motor vehicle storage?

However, the rough draft of the budget does include $865,000 just for parking garage maintenance and equipment.

So, in a city that proclaims that it supports cleaner air, safer streets, and progressive causes, we've got a budget that proposes to spend more money on taxpayer-subsidized parking than on bike, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure combined.

Now, other, privately-owned parking garages manage to cover their maintenance and equipment costs without taxpayer bailouts. Furthermore, I see quite a few expensive late-model cars going into and coming out of our city-owned garages. It seems to me that the city's parking division ought to get its own customers to pay the costs of the parking that they use, instead of asking Portland taxpayers to pay for wealthy motorists' parking spots.

A safer Franklin Street – in 2024

Also take a look at page 29 of the document, where you'll find the city's longer-range finance strategy for the tackling its most visionary plans:



School construction projects will monopolize most of the city's capital budget for the next few years. That means that the city's big livable streets projects are likely to be postponed far into the future due to lack of money.

Implementing the "Transforming Forest Avenue" plan might happen, finally, in 2021. The new Franklin Street will have to wait 'til fiscal year 2024. Converting State and High Streets back to 2-way traffic: 2025.

Take a look for yourself – it's a good introduction to understanding why our City Councilors are interested in increasing the city's tax base.

"Keep Portland Livable" is making Portland's gentrification problem worse

A couple weeks ago, we learned that Peter Monro and Tim Paradis, the two men behind “Keep Portland Livable,” had been working closely with the developers of the proposed Midtown development in Bayside, and will now support a revised proposal with a large reduction in housing.

I'd been reserving judgement on this turn of events until I'd had a chance to see the revised plans. Now that those have been posted on the city's website, I'm pretty disappointed. The new project is, however, entirely consistent with the privileged mindset of the well-to-do homeowners who bankrolled "Keep Portland Livable." Here are some of its problems:

They subtracted lots of the housing, but kept most of the parking.

The most credible complaints from “Keep Portland Livable” concerned the massive parking garage being proposed. But, in the updated version that bears the Paradis/Monro seal of approval, the massive garage is still there, and it actually grew an additional level.

In fact, it now would stand as the tallest, most prominent edifice in the revised proposal (pictured at right). How's that for symbolism?

The new Paradis/Monro project dedicates a much higher proportion of real estate to car storage than to people. The original plan was to have about 1.3 parking spaces per apartment. But under the new plan, each apartment will have 1.8 parking spots. That’ll help “keep it livable” for wealthier residents who want to bring multiple cars with them into the heart of the city, but it's going to make the city's streets less livable for everyone else.

It won't be more affordable; in fact, it will likely be more expensive.
The revised proposal makes no provisions for more-affordable housing — indeed, with hundreds of fewer apartments available in this new proposal, the developers will need to charge substantially higher rents for each unit in order to satisfy their investors and break even on construction costs. And speaking of rent inflation...

The truncated apartment buildings in the revised proposal (bottom, above) will have fewer apartments, and therefore they'll only be "livable" to half as many families.

It's a lost opportunity to address Portland's housing shortage.
The original proposal would have had up to 850 apartments. The revised project, with only 440 apartments, gives 410 fewer households the opportunity to live within short walking distance of three supermarkets, a dozen bus routes, downtown retail services and thousands of jobs.

Hundreds of new families are moving to Portland each year. Many are moving from places like Los Angeles or Brooklyn out of a desire to live in an attractive city near the ocean; many others are moving from rural areas out of necessity to live near health care and social services.

How the city makes room for these newcomers is a largely unresolved question.

Now that the "midtown" proposal has been scaled back with 410 fewer homes, it’s not as though 410 apartment-seekers who would have lived in the high rises will simply evaporate into thin air. Instead of occupying a long-vacant lot in Bayside, many of those newcomers will instead take over apartments and homes in established neighborhoods like Parkside, Munjoy Hill, or the West End (where Monro himself settled a few years ago when he arrived here from Massachusetts).

Or, if they don’t take over housing in Portland, perhaps they’ll join the thousands of migrants taking up residence in suburbs like Scarborough and Windham instead, where running even the most basic errands require burnt offerings of fossil fuels.

It's a terrible precedent for civic planning
The original 'midtown' proposal was faithful to the city's "New Vision for Bayside," a 1999 neighborhood plan that explicitly called for high-rise buildings and hundreds of new apartments to be built on this site to make Bayside feel like an extension of downtown and to help reduce suburban sprawl in rural communities outside of Portland. It was a good plan, and these developers collaborated closely with city planners and neighborhood leaders as their plans coalesced over a period of several years.

The opinions of two wealthy dudes aren't supposed to trump the city's long-standing economic development and housing policies. But the "Keep Portland Livable" guys have shown us a new, unwelcome truth for our income-stratified city: that those with the privilege to buy their own lawyers, public relations flacks, and lots of Facebook advertising can assert a de facto veto over the city's progressive housing goals and neighborhood-based planning process.

No urban plan will ever satisfy everyone, but the city's planning process is intended to balance and prioritize countervailing concerns (for instance, the overwhelming need for new housing, versus a few residents' aesthetic preferences for horizontally-oriented groundscrapers).

If the city's wealthy citizens are going to veto any new housing proposal that they don't like, then the city will quickly become inhospitable to everyone but the wealthy.

Urban design needs to be less elitist
I've heard from several people in the past few weeks who have seen the new plan, observed its weaknesses and wryly concluded that Paradis and Monro have "sold out" their values by agreeing to this compromise.

Saying that they've “sold out” misjudges the men’s intentions, though. Peter Monro and Tim Paradis are wealthy homeowners (Monro would really like to tell you about his recent two-month Spanish vacation), whose West End and Old Port property puts them in Portland’s top stratum of real estate wealth.

The city's housing shortage simply isn't a problem for these guys. And so, in the absence of real problems, it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd get so wrapped up in a first-world problem like a moderately tall apartment complex being built in the middle of the city.

Still, struggling to maintain some degree of egalitarianism in our cities against the desires of an increasingly powerful and wealthy 1% will be the defining challenge of urban planning in the next few decades. These guys are on the wrong side of that struggle. As Victor Gruen was to freeways, so Keep Portland Livable is to gentrification.

The challenge for the next generation – my generation – is to make sure that our revitalized cities will still make room for the diversity of people who would like to live in them. Keep Portland Livable's midtown intervention – like the destructive urban renewal of the last century – is an instructive example of what not to do.

Pavement polluters would pay for more sustainable infrastructure under proposed "stormwater charge"

During a 2-inch rainstorm, the parking lots and big-box rooftops of the "Pine Tree Shopping Center" and Quirk car dealership (pictured at right) dump about 1,500,000 gallons of oil-slicked runoff pollution into Portland's sewers, which proceed to overflow into the headwaters of the Fore River.

In a city that prizes its working waterfront and its locally-caught fish and lobster, this particular form of parking pollution is a big problem. The good news is that the city has committed to a $170 million upgrade of its infrastructure to handle this pollution. Even better: for the first time ever, parking lot owners, who are responsible for a substantial amount of the pollution, might actually foot a fair share of the bill.


Right now, sewers get paid for through our water bills; parking lot owners don't pay anything, even though their asphalt sends hundreds of millions of gallons of gasoline-slicked sewage into Casco Bay each year.

But for over a year now, the city's been holding public hearings on its proposed new "stormwater charge," which is its preferred way of paying for federally-mandated sewer upgrades for Clean Water Act compliance. The city's proposal would ask property-owners to pay fees in proportion to the amount of "impermeable surface" – rooftops and pavement – that they own.

This could be a significant step towards reducing the city's environmentally-destructive subsidies for motorists. Right now, parking lot owners are getting a free pass on the pollution they cause, but with the proposed stormwater charge, parking lot owners would be forced to pay to clean up Casco Bay.

In the short term, the fee will provide more funding for "green infrastructure" projects, such as traffic-calming sidewalk extensions that incorporate stormwater filtration gardens (like the one pictured at left, which was installed on Commercial Street earlier this year). And over the longer term, the new tax on pavement will help encourage more property owners to convert low-value parking lots to more productive, more urban uses – and encourage more motorists to leave the car at home.

The idea's got a lot of momentum behind it, but he city's also hearing a lot of opposition to this idea.  Anyone who wants to weigh in with a voice of support would help.

To learn more:
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/1331/Stormwater-Service-Charge

And to thank a city councilor for supporting this concept:
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/132/City-Council

Traffic engineers *still* want to widen Franklin Street

At left: Gorrill-Palmer Engineers' proposal for an 8-lane Franklin Street, blocking the Bayside Trail crossing between Marginal Way and Somerset Street.

This Wednesday, Oct. 1, will be the second public workshop for the Franklin Street redesign study. It starts at 5:30 p.m. in the main library's Rines Auditorium (on the basement level).

There's some good stuff being planned, but the team needs to be challenged – forcefully – on their proposal for the northernmost section near Marginal Way, pictured at left. 

 

Traffic engineers from Gorrill-Palmer – the same guys who proposed turning Franklin into a full-on freeway ten years ago – seem to have missed the long discussions about how this study's purpose was to make Franklin Street safer and friendlier to foot traffic. 

 

Instead, they've sketched out plans to widen Franklin from 6 lanes to 8 lanes north of Somerset Street. 

 

The proposal would make the intersection of Franklin and Marginal Way one of the most massive intersections in the greater Portland region – almost as big as the junction of Route 1 and Gorham Road at the center of sprawl-choked Scarborough.

The traffic engineers claim that extra lanes are needed to accommodate their forecast of 8% more cars by 2030. In other words, motorists will get more space to accellerate to freeway speeds, and pedestrians will get longer crosswalks and more opportunities to get maimed by motorists.

This section of Franklin would be the first section to be reconstructed (in 2016), so it's important to get it right – or at the very least, not make it any worse than it is today.

If you're coming to Wednesday's workshop, a good question to ask might be why we need 33% more lanes built in 2016 in order to accommodate science-fictional traffic that won't exist for another 15 years (if ever)?

Another good question to ask is whether the traffic engineers would be willing to film their children, or elderly parents, spend a weekday rush hour crossing this street on their own.

New St. Lawrence Theater offers to pay for better bus service

The new performance hall for the St. Lawrence Theater on the top of Munjoy Hill is going up for its planning board review this month, and the proposal includes a nice treat for Portland's bus riders: in order to entice more of its audience to ride transit to the facility (which, in an unusually progressive fashion, will be built without any on-site parking), the nonprofit is offering to pay to increase frequency and extend service hours on METRO's Route 1, which runs up and down Congress Street from one end of the peninsula to the other.

Currently, METRO's Route 1 runs roughly every half-hour from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with a couple of additional runs until 10 p.m.

If the new St. Lawrence Arts venue is approved, the bus would run every 20 minutes, until 11 p.m., six days a week. They're also proposing to rebrand Route 1 as the "Art Line," a reference to its route through the heart of downtown's arts district.

The funding required for the additional service – $70,000 a year – would come from a surcharge in ticket fees at the new venue.  They're also planning other goodies, like abundant bike parking at the front door and discounts for cyclists. You can read the full "transportation demand management plan" here. 

Obviously, the enhanced bus service wouldn't just benefit theater patrons at St. Lawrence Arts. It would also benefit late-night hospital workers at Mercy and Maine Medical Center, on the other end of the line, plus dozens of restaurants and other arts venues downtown.

But no good idea goes unpunished: a group of wealthy neighbors calling themselves "Concerned Citizens of Munjoy Hill" is working hard to sink the proposal, or at least force St. Lawrence Arts to build an exorbitantly expensive parking garage.

So, if you'd rather see more sustainable transportation on Munjoy Hill instead of yet more parking, let the planning board know: email your comments to Nell Donaldson, HCD@portlandmaine.gov.